The Man Behind the Curtain

By Brooke Allen

Published: November 17, 2002

L. FRANK BAUM

Creator of Oz.

By Katharine M. Rogers.

Illustrated. 318 pp. New York:

St. Martin's Press. $27.95.

LIKE many another children's classic, L. Frank Baum's ''Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' (1900) has been eclipsed by the film it inspired. In this case, unlike so many others, the film is a great one, the equal of the book. But the MGM movie and the novel differ in fundamental ways, and it is too bad that the eccentric, attractive world Baum imagined remains unfamiliar to so many readers.

Take, for example, the Wicked Witch of the West as she is treated by Baum and subsequently by the creators of the film. Baum's witch is afraid of the blustering Cowardly Lion and even of the dark. In short, she is human, with pathetic little human weaknesses and foibles, and not a figure of pure evil; Baum did not believe in pure evil. And Baum's Dorothy, having accidentally melted the witch, is not overcome by emotion and remorse as is Judy Garland's tenderhearted celluloid Dorothy. Instead, she simply ''drew another bucket of water and threw it over the mess. She then swept it all out the door.'' This is entirely characteristic of the unsentimental tone of Baum's 14 Oz books, their emphasis on the homely American virtues of self-reliance and practicality.

The quintessentially American quality of these tales has struck many readers. Alison Lurie has likened Oz to ''an idealized version of America in 1900, happily isolated from the rest of the world, underpopulated and largely rural, with an expanding magic technology and what appear to be unlimited natural resources.'' And the values Baum unobtrusively preached to his young readers are also characteristically American: egalitarianism, tolerance, suspicion of pomp and ceremony, and a deep mistrust of leaders -- even democratically elected ones. As the Tin Woodman remarks of his stint as emperor of the Winkies, ''Like a good many kings and emperors, I have a grand title, but very little real power, which allows me time to amuse myself in my own way.'' Baum often uses such asides as a vehicle for wry commentary: the citizens of the Emerald City, for instance, are pleased by the Scarecrow's accession to the throne, '' 'For,' they said, 'there is not another city in all the world that is ruled by a stuffed man.' And, so far as they knew, they were quite right'' -- the ''so far as they knew'' being a brilliant comment upon rulers as a species.

For some odd reason, Baum has never been the subject of a full-length biography. Katharine M. Rogers, a scholar and a lifelong Oz devotee, has written one, and a charming figure Baum turns out to be. He appears to have been one of the very few writers who really were exactly as one would want them to be: sweet-natured, kind, a loving husband and father. He was also reasonable and liberal, with a sardonic sense of humor that prevented his books from ever becoming cloying. His only real fault was ineptitude with money, but he was wise enough to marry a woman whose gifts complemented his. One of Baum's four sons described him as ''a creative man with glorious ideas -- but a poor businessman -- enthusiastic -- imaginative -- but unreal and impractical -- I always said it was a good thing that Mother managed the family finances instead of Father.'' ''He was a very handsome man,'' a contemporary recalled, ''but very modest and reserved. He liked to meet people, mingle with them, talk with them.''

Born in 1856, Baum passed a happy upper-middle-class childhood in and around Syracuse, where his father was a prominent businessman. Baum had a passion for the stage, and after he appeared in a play at the Union Square Theater in New York, his father handed over to him a string of theaters he owned upstate. Baum set about writing comedies and melodramas for them, with some success, but business troubles -- for once, not entirely his own fault -- ended this venture.

In 1882 he married Maud Gage, a handsome and strong-minded woman who was a perfect balance and foil for the easygoing Baum. Maud was the daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, who helped Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony found the National Woman Suffrage Association. Under the influence of his wife and mother-in-law, Baum became an enthusiastic convert to feminism. He was, Rogers writes, ''a secure man who did not worry about asserting his masculine authority,'' and he was not bothered that Maud had the upper hand in the marriage; in fact he seemed to welcome her take-charge attitude. His feminist beliefs would have a profound effect on his fiction. Nearly all of his child heroes were girls, girls who rely on their own resources and not on the aid, or validation, of men. He thought men who did not support feminist aspirations ''selfish, opinionated, conceited or unjust -- and perhaps all four combined,'' as he wrote in a newspaper editorial. ''The tender husband, the considerate father, the loving brother, will be found invariably championing the cause of women.''

In 1888 he decided to try his fortunes in the West, and moved his family to the grim town of Aberdeen in what would eventually become South Dakota. It is the Dakota Territory and not Kansas (which he never visited) that was the inspiration for Dorothy Gale's gray, austere home. Baum's general store was, predictably, a failure; the bank foreclosed and Baum then bought one of Aberdeen's newspapers, which he ran for less than two years -- ''until,'' as he commented, ''the sheriff wanted the paper more than I.'' In 1891 the family relocated to Chicago, and Baum started all over again, this time as a journalist. His first fantasy for children, ''Mother Goose in Prose,'' was published in 1897, and after the spectacular success of ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' three years later, his serious money troubles were more or less over, although he continued to mismanage his finances whenever he was given the chance and even had to declare bankruptcy at one point.

Baum wrote more than 70 children's books, some under various noms de plume, but except for a few outstanding ones -- ''Queen Zixi of Ix'' (1905), for example, or ''The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale'' (1901) -- his reputation rests on the Oz books. Rogers is a fine interpreter of these stories; she shares Baum's aesthetic and especially his sense of humor. Not all of ''L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz'' is as readable as it should be, since Rogers devotes an unnecessary number of pages to describing the books' complicated plots, but these passages are easily skipped over, and do little to mar what is essentially a strong and sympathetic portrait.

Over his writing desk, Baum hung a framed quotation from the Bible as a caveat: ''When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child.'' He succeeded in writing simply while never sacrificing emotional sophistication or his natural respect for every child's moral capacities; one of the things that make his stories fascinating is their idiosyncratic attack on ancient philosophical questions, as Michael Patrick Hearn, author of ''The Annotated Wizard of Oz'' (1983), has pointed out. The argument between the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman on the relative importance of head and heart, for example, echoes Plato's dialogue ''Charmides'': instead of resolving this unresolvable problem, Baum wisely offers a compromise in which the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman vow, at the end of ''The Marvelous Land of Oz,'' never to part. Another timeless conundrum, the question of where exactly the soul resides, is amusingly illustrated in the person of the Tin Woodman, who started out human but kept accidentally chopping off bits of his body and having them replaced by the tinsmith until eventually he was all tin. These are real intellectual problems, as Rogers remarks, and while ''it is easy to see the characters' naïveté . . . Baum also raises doubts about definitions conventionally accepted as adequate.''

Romantic love was, in Baum's opinion, an ''unsatisfactory topic which children can comprehend neither in its esoteric nor exoteric meaning,'' and he resolved to banish it from Oz. It was a rule he honored -- brilliantly -- in the breach, introducing romantic love into his stories only rarely and in order to comment ironically on its silliness. As the lovelorn Gloria remarks in ''The Scarecrow of Oz'' (1915), ''A young lady cannot decide whom she will love, or choose the most worthy. Her heart alone decides for her, and whomsoever her heart selects, she must love, whether he amounts to much or not.''

''The Tin Woodman of Oz'' (1918) contains a superb satire on romantic conventions. Years earlier, before he became tin, the Woodman loved a Munchkin girl, Nimmie Amee. She became even fonder of him in tin than in human form, since she would no longer have to cook for a man who did not eat or make the bed for one who did not sleep -- a pragmatic preference that proved her, so far as the foolish Woodman is concerned, ''as wise as she was brave and beautiful.''

Now, many books later, the Woodman remembers Nimmie Amee and decides that duty requires him to return and offer himself to her. He teams up with a Tin Soldier who became tin in the same way that he did and who also once loved Nimmie Amee; they decide to seek her out and see which of them she wants to marry. But when they finally find her, they discover that she is already married to Chopfyt, a creature made up of the discarded body parts of the two tin men, and that after having trained her new husband to hoe the cabbages and dust the furniture to her satisfaction, she takes no further interest in her former swains. As Rogers comments, even children can understand Nimmie Amee's ''crass utilitarianism'' and the incongruity in the tin men's ''resolution to marry for duty alone, their confidence about the feelings of a girl they have forgotten for years and their blissful unawareness that their attitude is inappropriate. Adults can perceive a similarity between these absurdities and attitudes that have been seriously presented in romantic literature.''

While the Oz books have always sold fairly well, Baum's reputation went steadily downhill after his death in 1919. His work, for some reason, began to be attacked for blandness and for what the scholar Gillian Avery once called ''easy optimism.'' Edward Eager, himself a children's writer of genius, complained in the 1940's of the Oz books' ''lack of literary distinction'' and said that ''some of his later books really typify all one doesn't like about the America of the World War I period.'' And in the 1950's Baum was suspected of having been something less than a red-blooded capitalist, with Oz's utopian elements (not developed until late in the series) looking a little too socialistic for some people's comfort.

Rereading Baum, with his gentle irony and easy rationalism, makes it hard to understand these criticisms or to attribute them to anything loftier than mere shifts in fashion. And now, in the light of 21st-century problems and obsessions, his lessons seem especially relevant. In Oz, as in the real world, for example, war is too often based on illusory or meaningless differences, and patriotic bombast is born from base provincialism -- Baum's Boolooroo in ''Sky Island'' ''knows'' that earth is uninhabitable and laughs at the ignorance of the Americans who ''know nothing of Sky Island, which is the Center of the Universe and the only place anyone would care to live.'' Baum also promoted a respect for the point of view of others: even the most terrifying beings, like the Wheelers in ''Ozma of Oz'' (1907), have some essential weakness that makes them vulnerable, which all the frightening aggression and bravado is designed to cover up. And Billina, the intelligent hen of the same novel, illustrates the importance of cultural relativism: when Dorothy expresses disgust at the hen's diet of live bugs, Billina reminds her, ''Live things are much fresher and more wholesome than dead ones, and you humans eat all sorts of dead creatures.''

As for the value of diversity, a lesson that today's children's authors and librarians go to sometimes painful lengths to promote, what writer teaches this better than Baum? His stories almost always involve a group of highly diverse but equal individuals, each of whom contributes something to the resolution of the plot. No one, however bizarre, is excluded. In ''The Land of Oz,'' a highly magnified Woggle-Bug encounters the little party of heroes, which consists of a boy, a pumpkin-headed man, a live saw-horse, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. The Woggle-Bug is startled. ''But -- pardon me if I seem inquisitive -- are you not all rather -- ahem!-rather unusual?'' To which the Scarecrow wisely replies: ''Not more so than yourself. . . . Everything in life is unusual until you get accustomed to it.''

Photo: L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz, in 1908, the year he turned 52. (Library Of Congress/from ''L. Frank Baum: Creator Of Oz'')

Brooke Allen reviews frequently for The New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic Monthly.